4 - Louis MacNeice

Summary

In an uncollected poem of 1995, ʿMacNeiceʾs Londonʾ, Derek Mahon imagines Louis MacNeice in wartime, in ʿA bunker of civilised sound, / A BBC studioʾ:

Thirty years dead

I see your ghost, as the Blitz carooms overhead,

Dissolve into a smoke-ring, meditative,

Classic, outside time and space,

Alone with itself, in the presence of the nations,

Well-bred, dry, the voice

Of London, speaking of lost illusions.

These lines capture, in a brilliant miniature, much of the complexity of Louis MacNeiceʾs cultural and historical situations. While the adjectives here - ʿmeditativeʾ, ʿclassicʾ, ʿaloneʾ, ʿwell-bredʾ, ʿdryʾ - seem to map out the distinctive qualities of the poetʾs voice, that voice is also working as ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ while it speaks from the wartime BBC to the world. Mahonʾs final line-break allows the reader to sense the distance between the intimacy and solitude of the poet and the prepared voice of the public writer: as ʿthe voiceʾ turns into ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ, we feel a mild and complicating shock of something ʿoutside time and spaceʾ that suddenly locates itself in a specific moment and situation.